Using the Internet for property purchases

-


Using the Internet for property purchases Property investments have to be carefully considered and evaluated. There are many online sites that help you make preliminary inquiries about location, prices and deals in property markets. Here are a few such websites that you must go through for preliminary investigations about the property that interests you.

1. Property Search Portals

There are several websites dedicated to listing properties directly from builders, property owners as well as from agents/brokers. These sites help you scan through hundreds of properties from the comfort of your home. Mainly the features they offer are
  • Facilitating search amongst several properties by sorting them on the basis of price, location, covered area etc.
  • Providing information about amenities, local infrastructure like schools or hospitals, connectivity and price history.
  • Sites like magicbricks.com, a leading real estate portal, help you not only search but also register your requirements, which is in turn relayed to listed property owners that match your criteria. Such registration of requirements is free. As and when matches are found, the website sends emails or sms to you. Either you may contact property owners or allow them to contact you. After initial discussions of phone you may visit the property site for an inspection and decide if the property suits your requirements.
  • You can use these websites to search for properties available on rent/lease as well.
  • Identifying Trends - Not only will such information help potential buyers but also owners of property to identify ongoing trends in rentals or price of properties similar to their own.
2. Group buying Portals

To get great discounts on property purchase, one can join a group booking channel like Groffr.com and Discountedflats. These websites allow individuals to form groups large enough to negotiate great deals while buying from builders in their new residential projects. Thus individual retail investors get to participate in pre launch offers which were earlier offered only to investors. Deals could include not only huge discounts on price, but also waiver of various ancillary expenses like registration costs, brokerages etc. In fact you can negotiate for great home loan rates too, on sites like GNBIndia.com that facilitate group bargaining with loan providers.

3. Discussion forums/Groups

The net enables forming of groups by people who are invested in a certain project. These groups help exert pressure on the builder for project completion on time and for keeping of all promises that were made at the time of signing of agreement. One can look for groups on blogs, social networking media and discussion forums. It is easy to conduct a search on the web for such groups to find out experiences of other consumers. Verification of builder's reputation and past construction quality can also be checked.

It is important to note that the internet should only be used as a search tool, an aid to understand trends and for short listing properties thereby reducing the need for endless site visits. However physical inspection of the property and related papers is an absolute must.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Assessing Tax impact while choosing investments

-
Assessing Tax impact while choosing investment vehicles My client, a media professional, had a desire to own his own stocks and when he received an inheritance , he immediately opened an account a   Portfolio Management Scheme . As luck had it , markets rallied and the PMS delivered spectacular returns . All was well till it was time to file the year’s   ITR. His annual taxable income was 48 lakhs and a long term capital gains of 6   lakhs had been booked in the month of Dec 2022 . At a 10 % long term capital gain tax , with   one lakh exemption , my client was happy that the extra   tax liability was only Rs.50,000 . To his surprise his CA asked him to deposit 1.77 lakhs extra in taxes . How did the tax amount jump up from Rs.50,000 to 2.23 lakhs ?. The tax payable was more than four times the amount anticipated by my client. The culprit was   the capital gain that took his total income above 50 lakhs , a slab that attracts a 10 % surcharge on total ta...
Read more

Debt Alternatives

-
  As India moves towards becoming a 5 trillion-dollar economy, investors have much to gain by participating in this big growth decade via equities. But equities are essentially long gestation investments and come with their fair share of volatility. For investors looking at fixed income to park short term funds or wanting higher returns while diversifying from equities, traditional fixed income instruments and mutual funds offer limited options. On one hand there is  demand for products with higher returns in the fixed income space. On the other hand, is a growing requirement of funds by business owners and individuals for purposes that aren’t traditionally covered by banks or NBFCs. For example, Corporates both in traditional and new age business require high quality and different types of capital when they go through special situations like liquidity crunch, bankruptcy, promotor buy backs etc. Similarly on the retail side, our young consuming population needs quick and e...
Read more
-
    Factor Investing: An introduction   Factor investing, is an asset pricing and portfolio construction approach that involves targeting specific drivers of returns. There are five main factors associated with higher returns that are widely used in factor ETF strategies: value, small-caps, momentum, low volatility and quality (which is also known as dividend payers). A sixth factor, yield, is sometimes included in the main factor definition count. For the purpose of our writeup today, we will be focussing exclusively on factor-based ETFs with some compelling statistics that should help you as an investor to: - Critically evaluate performance of large cap investments in managed funds - Usher in ETFs as a cost effective and promising part of your core portfolio We will also restrict this analysis of funds to the large cap space. It is likely that in a few years midcap and small cap indexes will start outperforming their managed peers, but so far data points t...
Read more